Gender Roles The Great Gatsby, The Mystery Of Heroism,...

To quote author Chimamanda Adichie, â€Å"Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn t have the weight of gender expectations.† However, the influence of gender is pervasive from jobs to the military, even extending to education. Men are generally characterized as strong and independent. Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be more feeble and domestic by societal standards. These distinctions have always been the case in the United States, from the moment people first crossed the Bering Strait into North America. It should come as no surprise, then, that the societal expectations placed on gender affect literary works. Gender often conflicts with the hopes and dreams of the characters and makes it harder for them to achieve success. The flawed societal gender constructions found in American literature are adversarial to characters in their search for fulfillment. The concept of gender roles obstructing success is ubiq uitous in the many works, including The Great Gatsby, The Mystery of Heroism, The Scarlet Letter, A Raisin In The Sun, and The Death of A Salesman. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, gender has a large impact on Myrtle, Gatsby, and Jordan in their pursuit of prosperity. Myrtle, much like the main protagonist of the novel, Gatsby, was aspiring and wanted to have wealth and a lavish lifestyle. Because she was a woman, she would have been confronted with societal pressure against getting a job, so